Rise of the Edge – analytics and compute anywhere
The rising importance of data could be argued as one of the most important side effects of the internet revolution. Through advertising sales and return on investment metrics, the traditional sponsorship and advertising models have been thrown out of the window in favor of cold hard figures and data that can be acted upon, such as profiles, activities, email addresses and phone numbers.
Even if you’re not selling a product to a specific audience, the data produced from everyday interactions with servers through the Internet of Things can produce insights that can change the way businesses go about their processes.
This data is cultivated within these IoT devices, placed on the edge of the network, feeding businesses’ analytic platforms up in the cloud with the information they lust for. Within manufacturing, for example, machines in assembly can detect problems or even future issues reading from sensor data, in order to feed it back to the analytics platform for the business to act on.
According to research published in September from Global Industry Analysts, the global edge computing market is set to be worth over $17 billion by 2026. That presents a huge opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the innovations that that kind of market growth will bring, and an even bigger opportunity for those who can provide solutions at the edge.
There are clearly a lot of insights to be found on the edge, however feeding that information back to a cloud platform and then analyzing it can be a slow and intensive process.
The insights that can be gained from the information on the edge allow reaction in real-time, and feed analytic engines, that allow to take decisions on data predicting the future, that reduce spending, find new opportunities or alter the model of the business, to take a couple of examples.
Therefore, having the information fully formed before the arrival at the cloud and then aggregate information from many edge points in the cloud can be the difference between getting to market quicker and beating the competition or having to fight for every customer. That information doesn’t necessarily have to be regarding a product, a process or service that is being provided, it can in fact be analyzing how employees are working, when they are busiest and how they manage their time. Let’s take manufacturing for example.
Companies within the sector want to be able to analyze and detect changes in their production lines before a failure occurs. Edge computing helps by bringing the processing and storage of data closer to the equipment. This enables IoT sensors to monitor machine health with low latencies and perform analytics in real-time.
According to IBM, by 2025 every connected person in the world will have at least one digital data interaction every 18 seconds, and there will be even more devices driven interaction. The sheer amount of data that will need to be processed requires some analytics at source, with a clever, selected sync to the cloud only.
